We are not shortcuts. We're even more than two ways.

All one has to do is actually look at the streets in question to easily determine that they were designed from the beginning for mutlimodal use. They didn't end up that wide by accident and we're lucky they and the practical sensibility they represent are still there. Every time we diminish one of those modes, though, either directly like transit removal or indirectly by making non-motorized use too dangerous, our capacity as a community - the ability of the city to function as a platform for working, learning, recreating, giving and receiving care of all kinds - is diminished right along with it. That we have ended up, after two hundred years of public and private investment, in a position of begging for such basic consideration serves as testament to just how badly we have neglected not only our heritage but the ways of shared opportunity and decency that created this place. When city leaders do finally hear that begging, when it registers as something more than a spreadsheet, it will be their consciences making the case, not us.

Louisville metro and our place in it: The words are watching.

(H/T to Gabe Bullard of WFPL for the article link)

Has anyone else noticed that when local independent sorts are left to their own devices the metro area tends to get great national coverage and makes "best of" lists but when the regional power structure intervenes we always seem to get targeted with suspicious glances and generally confused disbelief?

Like the Ohio River, a Bridge Project Divides a Community, by Bobby Allyn (New York Times)

Hank V. Savitch, a professor of urban and public affairs at the University of Louisville, said that while some cities were shifting away from accommodating cars, Louisville’s project signaled a declaration of faith in suburban-style growth.

“They’re still fighting the last urban war, which was highway development — but that’s not the nature of the future of the city,” Professor Savitch said. “It will dissipate energy in the central city, where they should be concentrating investment, and instead draw capital to the outer metropolitan area.”

For New Albany, a complete streets and "streets as places" initiative is as much necessary defense mechanism as it is forward movement at this point but, the more we shed the 1Si/GLI/everybody-and-everything-in-service-to-exurban-expansion model, the more success we'll have in being the river hugging city we were designed to be. It's perhaps uncomfortable to think we've regressed to the point that something as fundamental as reclaiming our public streets for multiple, human uses - for the people who live and work here - needs to framed within the same pioneering ethos that built this place, but it's where we are 200 years into our history. In many ways, we're a start-up again and, like Louisville, our locally elected New Albany leaders would do well to heed the work of the independents already rebuilding and declaring us forward rather than outward bound.

In the early eighteen hundreds, pretty much everybody else hereabouts goose stepped in succession on the eastern side of the falls except for us and we became a gateway to something else entirely. It sounds more maudlin than I'd like, but wouldn't it be great if that were true again?

We have the basic infrastructure in place. We have the brains and the other resources. As Roger alluded recently, all we really have to do is decide.

"Get over it. Get used to it."

Given the overly familiar, often overbearing cast of characters, it's no surprise that some of the folks involved with the Bicentennial Commission are struggling when it comes to making traditional forms relevant in a modern world. Thankfully, a younger, more knowledgeable set is doing it just fine with an urgency and grace long missing from their better-known elders. It's theirs and similar names that will ultimately matter as we move into the post-historic now.

Paying attention to them? The sooner the better.

Toledo Bend:




Houndmouth: